These are two floral paintings on wooden shingles. Poppies and Dandelions were done as demonstration paintings for this week’s kids class. The kids loved painting on the wooden shingles instead of canvas. It was fun to try something new.

In our Wednesday morning adult art class this week I gave a demonstration on “Loosening up” your paintings. I took a workshop several years ago from Robert Burridge, a terrific California painter and teacher, who taught us to do these warm-up paintings. His idea is to line up 6-8 sheets of watercolor paper and then quickly lay on several colors of paint. They will then all look like abstract paintings. The second step is to paint out anything that doesn’t look like whatever subject you want the painting to be. For instance, in the floral painting shown here I filled in background and added a vase. Then I shaped up a few of the colors to look like flowers and leaves. This entire process, all three of these paintings, took about 20 minutes. This forces a painter to work quickly and loose.

We had a fun lesson yesterday with my young artist. We transformed an old canvas that had been painted as an abstract and turned it into a fun post-impressionist painting in the style of Matisse. Take a look at the before and after. What do you think?

Pat’s Favorite is an acrylic abstract, 12″ x 12″, on gallery wrap canvas. From time to time one of my students wants to experiment with abstract. That happened last week in art class so this is the demonstration painting that I did while explaining abstract.

One of my favorite students, Pat (see her here), is not a fan of abstract so I named this for her. 🙂

We had a terrific class this week where the kids painted representational abstract flowers. Great job everyone. If you have a young artist don’t forget about Art Camp coming up this summer. You can learn more about it here and download the PDF file with schedule and registration form.